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An explicit link between Gaussian fields and Gaussian Markov random fields: the stochastic partial differential equation approach

In English

Författare

Summary, in English

Continuously indexed Gaussian fields (GFs) are the most important ingredient in spatial statistical modelling and geostatistics. The specification through the covariance function gives an intuitive interpretation of the field properties. On the computational side, GFs are hampered with the big n problem, since the cost of factorizing dense matrices is cubic in the dimension. Although computational power today is at an all time high, this fact seems still to be a computational bottleneck in many applications. Along with GFs, there is the class of Gaussian Markov random fields (GMRFs) which are discretely indexed. The Markov property makes the precision matrix involved sparse, which enables the use of numerical algorithms for sparse matrices, that for fields in R-2 only use the square root of the time required by general algorithms. The specification of a GMRF is through its full conditional distributions but its marginal properties are not transparent in such a parameterization. We show that, using an approximate stochastic weak solution to (linear) stochastic partial differential equations, we can, for some GFs in the Matern class, provide an explicit link, for any triangulation of R-d, between GFs and GMRFs, formulated as a basis function representation. The consequence is that we can take the best from the two worlds and do the modelling by using GFs but do the computations by using GMRFs. Perhaps more importantly, our approach generalizes to other covariance functions generated by SPDEs, including oscillating and non-stationary GFs, as well as GFs on manifolds. We illustrate our approach by analysing global temperature data with a non-stationary model defined on a sphere.

Publiceringsår

2011

Språk

Engelska

Sidor

423-498

Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B: Statistical Methodology

Volym

73

Issue

4

Dokumenttyp

Artikel i tidskrift

Förlag

Wiley-Blackwell

Ämne

  • Probability Theory and Statistics

Nyckelord

  • Approximate Bayesian inference
  • Covariance functions
  • Gaussian fields
  • Gaussian Markov random fields
  • Latent Gaussian models
  • Sparse matrices
  • Stochastic partial differential equations

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt

  • ISSN: 1369-7412